Rube Goldeberg mixes in Freerunning; reminds us of human-sized game of Mouse Trap

Yep, those are just some shipping containers being used as dominoes in this very impressive Rube Goldberg machine. The apparatus includes a human element, with freerunners making their way through a whole bunch of obstacles. In fact, if you look closely you’ll see the outline of a man who just jumped from the top of each container to get to the ground. The project is a marketing device for Red Bull, who must have shelled out quite a bit for the setup. We’ve embedded the video after the break where you’ll see they went all out with the filming of the device.

To tell you the truth we kind of wish that a Rube-Goldberg build had been the goal of this year’s Redbull Creation Contest. It would have been all but impossible to go this big, but some of the stages (like a suspended bath tub slowly draining its reservoir of water) would have been easy to make happen. Well, there’s always next year!

There are actually allot of insufficiently explored parallels between parkour and hacking. it’s really a form of human kinesthetic hacking. You’re taking a thing that has a set of known uses and exploring the edge cases using a set of techniques honed for that purpose. I know plenty of people who practice parkour and are hacker space members, engineers, physicists and comic book fans.